The Red Book, page 10
In Liber Novus, Jung articulated his understanding of the historical transformations of Christianity, and the historicity of symbolic formations. He took up this theme in his writings on the psychology of alchemy and on the psychology of Christian dogmas, and most of all in Answer to Job. As we have seen, it was Jung’s view that his prewar visions were prophetic that led to the composition of Liber Novus. In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such “meaningful coincidences,” which he called synchronicity.247 He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914.
It is important to note that the relation of Liber Novus to Jung’s scholarly writings did not follow a straight point-by-point translation and elaboration. As early as 1916, Jung sought to convey some of the results of his experiments in a scholarly language, while continuing with the elaboration of his fantasies. One would do best to regard Liber Novus and the Black Books as representing a private opus that ran parallel to and alongside his public scholarly opus; whilst the latter was nourished by and drew from the former, they remained distinct. After ceasing to work on Liber Novus, he continued to elaborate his private opus—his own mythology—in his work on the tower, and in his stone carvings and paintings. Here, Liber Novus functioned as a generating center, and a number of his paintings and carvings relate to it. In psychotherapy, Jung sought to enable his patients to recover a sense of meaning in life through facilitating and supervising their own self-experimentation and symbol creation. At the same time, he attempted to elaborate a general scientific psychology.
The Publication of Liber Novus
While Jung had stopped working directly on Liber Novus, the question of what to do with it remained, and the issue of its eventual publication remained open. On April 10, 1942, Jung replied to Mary Mellon concerning a printing of the Sermones: “Concerning the printing of the ‘Seven Sermones’ I should wish you to wait for a while. I had in mind to add certain material, but I have hesitated for years to do it. But at such an occasion one might risk it.”248 In 1944, he had a major heart attack and did not see this plan through.
In 1952, Lucy Heyer put forward a project for a biography of Jung. At Olga Froebe’s suggestion and on Jung’s insistence, Cary Baynes began collaborating with Lucy Heyer on this project. Cary Baynes considered writing a biography of Jung based on Liber Novus.249 To Jung’s disappointment, she withdrew from the project. After several years of interviews with Lucy Heyer, Jung terminated her biographical project in 1955, because he was dissatisfied with her progress. In 1956, Kurt Wolff proposed another biographical project, which became Memories, Dreams, Reflections. At some stage, Jung gave Aniela Jaffé a copy of the draft of Liber Novus, which had been made by Toni Wolff. Jung authorized Jaffé to cite from Liber Novus and the Black Books in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.250 In his interviews with Aniela Jaffé, Jung discussed Liber Novus and his self-experimentation. Unfortunately, she did not reproduce all his comments.
On October 31, 1957, she wrote to Jack Barrett of the Bollingen Foundation concerning Liber Novus, and informed him that Jung had suggested that it and the Black Books be given to the library of the University of Basel with a restriction of 50 years, 80 years, or longer, as “he hates the idea that anybody should read this material without knowing the relations to his life, etc.” She added that she had decided not to use much of this material in Memories.251 In one early manuscript of Memories, Jaffé had included a transcription of the draft typescript of most of Liber Primus.252 But it was omitted from the final manuscript, and she did not cite from Liber Novus or the Black Books. In the German edition of Memories, Jaffé included Jung’s epilogue to Liber Novus as an appendix. Jung’s flexible date stipulations concerning access to Liber Novus were similar to that which he gave around the same time concerning the publication of his correspondence with Freud.253
On October 12, 1957, Jung told Jaffé that he had never finished the Red Book.254 According to Jaffé, in the spring of the year 1959 Jung, after a time of lengthy ill-health, took up Liber Novus again, to complete the last remaining unfinished image. Once again, he took up the transcription of the manuscript into the calligraphic volume. Jaffé notes, “However, he still could not or would not complete it. He told me that it had to do with death.”255 The calligraphic transcription breaks off midsentence, and Jung added an afterword, which also broke off midsentence. The postscript and Jung’s discussions of its donation to an archive suggest that Jung was aware that the work would eventually be studied at some stage. After Jung’s death, Liber Novus remained with his family, in accordance with his will.
In her 1971 Eranos lecture, “The creative phases in Jung’s life,” Jaffé cited two passages from the draft of Liber Novus, noting that “Jung placed a copy of the manuscript at my disposal with permission to quote from it as occasion arose.”256 This was the only time she did so. Pictures from Liber Novus were also shown in a BBC documentary on Jung narrated by Laurens van der Post in 1972. These created widespread interest in it. In 1975, after the much acclaimed publication of The Freud/Jung Letters, William McGuire, representing Princeton University Press, wrote to the lawyer of the Jung estate, Hans Karrer, with a publication proposal for Liber Novus and a collection of photographs of Jung’s stone carvings, paintings, and the tower. He proposed a facsimile edition, possibly without the text. He wrote that “we are uninformed of the number of its pages, the relative amount of text and pictures, and the content and interest of the text.”257 No one in the press had actually seen or read the work or knew much about it. This request was denied.
In 1975, some reproductions from the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus were displayed at an exhibition commemorating Jung’s centenary in Zürich. In 1977, nine paintings from Liber Novus were published by Jaffé in C. G. Jung: Word and Image and in 1989 a few other related paintings were published by Gerhard Wehr in his illustrated biography of Jung.258
In 1984, Liber Novus was professionally photographed, and five facsimile editions were prepared. These were given to the five families directly descendent from Jung. In 1992, Jung’s family, who had supported the publication of Jung’s Collected Works in German (completed in 1995), commenced an examination of Jung’s unpublished materials. As a result of my researches, I found one transcription and a partial transcription of Liber Novus and presented them to the Jung heirs in 1997. Around the same time, another transcription was presented to the heirs by Marie-Louise von Franz. I was invited to present reports on the subject and its suitability for publication, and made a presentation on the subject. On the basis of these reports and discussions, the heirs decided in May 2000 to release the work for publication.
The work on Liber Novus was at the center of Jung’s self-experimentation. It is nothing less than the central book in his oeuvre. With its publication, one is now in a position to study what took place there on the basis of primary documentation as opposed to the fantasy, gossip, and speculation that makes up too much of what is written on Jung, and to grasp the genesis and constitution of Jung’s later work. For nearly a century, such a reading has simply not been possible, and the vast literature on Jung’s life and work that has arisen has lacked access to the single most important documentary source. This publication marks a caesura, and opens the possibility of a new era in the understanding of Jung’s work. It provides a unique window into how he recovered his soul and, in so doing, constituted a psychology. Thus this introduction does not end with a conclusion, but with the promise of a new beginning.
1.The following draws, at times directly, on my reconstruction of the formation of Jung’s psychology in Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Jung referred to the work both as Liber Novus and as The Red Book, as it has become generally known. Because there are indications that the former is its actual title, I have referred to it as such throughout for consistency. A number of these themes are elaborated more fully in my C. G. Jung: A Biography in Books (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012) and in James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani, The Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
2.See Jacqueline Carroy, Les personnalités multiples et doubles: entre science et fiction (Paris: PUF, 1993).
3.See Gustav Theodor Fechner, The Religion of a Scientist, ed. and tr. Walter Lowrie (New York: Pantheon, 1946).
4.See Jean Starobinski, “Freud, Breton, Myers,” in L’oeuil vivante II: La relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), and W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Werner Laurie, 1925). Jung possessed a copy of the latter.
5.Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, tr. A. Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 1.
6.On how this mistakenly came to be seen as Jung’s autobiography, see my Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even (London, Karnac, 2004), ch. 1, “ ‘How to catch the bird’: Jung and his first biographers.” See also Alan Elms, “The auntification of Jung,” in Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
7.Memories, p. 30.
8.“Fundamental psychological conceptions,” CW 18, §397.
9.Memories, p. 57.
10.Ibid., p. 73.
11.Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish scientist and Christian mystic. In 1743, he underwent a religious crisis, which is depicted in his Journal of Dreams. In 1745, he had a vision of Christ. He then devoted his life to relating what he had heard and seen in Heaven and Hell and learned from the angels, and in interpreting the internal and symbolic meaning of the Bible. Swedenborg argued that the Bible had two levels of meaning: a physical, literal level, and an inner, spiritual level. These were linked by correspondences. He proclaimed the advent of a “new church” that represented a new spiritual era. According to Swedenborg, from birth one acquired evils from one’s parents which are lodged in the natural man, who is diametrically opposed to the spiritual man. Man is destined for Heaven, and he cannot reach there without spiritual regeneration and a new birth. The means to this lay in charity and faith. See Eugene Taylor, “Jung on Swedenborg, redivivus,” Jung History, 2, 2 (2007), pp. 27–31.
12.Memories, p. 120.
13.See CW 1, §66, fig. 2.
14.On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena: A Psychiatric Study, 1902, CW 1.
15.Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, tr. D. Vermilye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1900/1994).
16.Pierre Janet, Névroses et idées fixes (Paris: Alcan, 1898); Morton Prince, Clinical and Experimental Studies in Personality (Cambridge, MA: Sci-Art, 1929). See my “Automatic writing and the discovery of the unconscious,” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture 54 (1993), pp. 100–131.
17.Black Book 2, p. 1 (JFA; all the Black Books are in the JFA).
18.MP, p. 164.
19.See Gerhard Wehr, An Illustrated Biography of Jung, tr. M. Kohn (Boston: Shambala, 1989), p. 47; Aniela Jaffé, ed., C. G. Jung: Word and Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1979), pp. 42–43.
20.MP, p. 164, and unpublished letters, JFA.
21.“Experimental researches on the associations of the healthy,” 1904, CW 2.
22.On the Psychology of Dementia Praecox: An Attempt, CW 3.
23.“The content of the psychoses,” CW 3, §339.
24.Freud archives, Library of Congress. See Ernst Falzeder, “The story of an ambivalent relationship: Sigmund Freud and Eugen Bleuler,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 52 (2007), pp. 343–68.
25.JA.
26.Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 24.
27.Jung possessed a complete set of this.
28.Jung, The Psychology of the Unconscious, CW B, §36. In his 1952 revision of this text, Jung qualified this (Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, §29).
29.“Address on the founding of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich, 24 April, 1948,” CW 18, §1131.
30.CW 5, p. xxvi.
31.Ibid., p. xxix.
32.Ibid.
33.Cf. Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 25.
34.Black Book 2, pp. 25–26.
35.In 1925, he gave the following interpretation to this dream: “The meaning of the dream lies in the principle of the ancestral figure: not the Austrian officer—obviously he stood for the Freudian theory—but the other, the Crusader, is an archetypal figure, a Christian symbol living from the twelfth century, a symbol that does not really live today, but on the other hand is not wholly dead either. It comes out of the times of Meister Eckhart, the time of the culture of the Knights, when many ideas blossomed, only to be killed again, but they are coming again to life now. However, when I had this dream, I did not know this interpretation” (Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 42).
36.Black Book 2, pp. 17–18.
37.Ibid., p. 17.
38.Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 42.
39.Ibid., pp. 40–41. E. A. Bennet noted Jung’s comments on this dream: “At first he thought the ‘twelve dead men’ referred to the twelve days before Christmas for that is the dark time of the year, when traditionally witches are about. To say ‘before Christmas’ is to say ‘before the sun lives again,’ for Christmas day is at the turning point of the year when the sun’s birth was celebrated in the Mithraic religion . . . Only much later did he relate the dream to Hermes and the twelve doves” (Meetings with Jung: Conversations recorded by E. A. Bennet during the Years 1946–1961 [London: Anchor Press, 1982; Zürich, Daimon Verlag, 1985], p. 93). In 1951 in “The psychological aspects of the Kore,” Jung presented some material from Liber Novus (describing them all as part of a dream series) in an anonymous form (“case Z.” ), tracing the transformations of the anima. He noted that this dream “shows the anima as elflike, i.e., only partially human. She can just as well be a bird, which means that she may belong wholly to nature and can vanish (i.e., become unconscious) from the human sphere (i.e., consciousness)” (CW 9, 1, §371). See also Memories, pp. 195–96.
40.“On the question of psychological types,” CW 6.
41.See below, p. 123.
42.Introduction to Jungian Psychology, pp. 47–48.
43.Barbara Hannah recalls that “Jung used to say in later years that his tormenting doubts as to his own sanity should have been allayed by the amount of success he was having at the same time in the outer world, especially in America” (C. G. Jung: His Life and Work. A Biographical Memoir [New York: Perigree, 1976], p. 109).
44.Memories, p. 200.
45.Draft, p. 8.
46.Gerda Breuer and Ines Wagemann, Ludwig Meidner: Zeichner, Maler, Literat 1884–1966 (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 124–49. See Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 145–77.
47.Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation and the Vital Message (London: Psychic Press, 1918), p. 9.
48.Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 28.
49.Ibid.
50.Ibid.
51.MP, p. 23.
52.The subsequent notebooks are black, hence Jung referred to them as the Black Books.
53.Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 48.
54.St. Augustine, Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul, ed. and tr. Gerard Watson (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), p. 23. Watson notes that Augustine “had been through a period of intense strain, close to a nervous breakdown, and the Soliloquies are a form of therapy, an effort to cure himself by talking, or rather, writing” (p. v).
55.Ibid., p. 42. In Jung’s account here, it seems that this dialogue took place in the autumn of 1913, though this is not certain, because the dialogue itself does not occur in the Black Books, and no other manuscript has yet come to light. If this dating is followed, and in the absence of other material, it would appear that the material the voice is referring to is the November entries in Black Book 2, and not the subsequent text of Liber Novus or the paintings.
56.Ibid., p. 44.
57.Ibid., p. 46.
58.MP, p. 171.
59.Riklin’s painting generally followed the style of Augusto Giacometti: semi-figurative and fully abstract works, with soft floating colors. Private possession, Peter Riklin. There is one painting of Riklin’s from 1915/6, Verkündigung, in the Kunsthaus in Zürich, which was donated by Maria Moltzer in 1945. Giacometti recalled: “Riklin’s psychological knowledge was extraordinarily interesting and new to me. He was a modern magician. I had the feeling that he could do magic” (Von Stampa bis Florenz: Blätter der Erinnerung [Zürich: Rascher, 1943], pp. 86–87).
60.Introduction to Jungian Psychology, p. 51.
61.The vision that ensued is found below in Liber Primus, chapter 5, “Descent into Hell in the Future,” p. 147.
62.St. Ignatius of Loyola, “The spiritual exercises,” in Personal Writings, tr. J. Munitiz and P. Endean (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 298. In 1939/40, Jung presented a psychological commentary on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola at the ETH (Philemon Series, forthcoming).
63.This passage was reproduced by William White in his Swedenborg: His Life and Writings, vol. 1 (London: Bath, 1867), pp. 293–94. In Jung’s copy of this work, he marked the second half of this passage with a line in the margin.
64.See Silberer, “Bericht über eine Methode, gewisse symbolische Halluzinations-Erscheinungen hervorzurufen und zu beobachten,” Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 2 (1909), pp. 513–25.
